Russians and Natives

But Muslim society was no longer autonomous; it was set against a new settler society that took root as a direct result of the Russian conquest. The earliest Russians to arrive were members of the conquering armies. They were followed by civilian functionaries and, in time, by traders, workers, and divers adventurers, so that quite soon a settler Russian society, complete with its own schools, churches, newspapers, and markets, appeared in Turkestan. Given the cautious approach to peasant re-

[81] V.P. Nalivkm, Tuzemtsy ran'she t teper ' (Tashkent, 1913), 72-75, passim; see also Togan, Turkili , 274.

[82] See, for instance, the report of a police agent sent from Tashkent to Bukhara on a secret mission m April 1910, in GARF, f. 102, op. 240 (1910), d. 277, l. 23.

[83] "Spravka" (21 May 1915), TsGARUz, f. 461, op. l, d. 2263, I. 160b.

settlement in Turkestan, the majority of its Russian population was connected with administration and trade. The emergence of Russian society also transformed the urban landscape. The Russians built their own quarters, which were self-consciously designed as advertisements for the superiority of the conquering civilization, adjacent to native cities. In common with urban development in other European colonies, these quarters were laid out according to a regular plan, their straight, wide streets contrasting to the labyrinthine neighborhoods of the traditional cities. Imperial architecture and the presence of churches further defined these quarters as different, and disproportionate expenditure and allocations ensured the maintenance of this order. Such "new cities" arose next to all major cities in Turkestan (in Bukhara, they developed along the Transcaspian Railway), while in nomadic territory, urban life emerged for the first time during this period. Vernyi (present-day Almaty), Pishpek (Bishkek), and Askhabad (Ashgabat) were all established as Russian settlements in this period and remained predominantly Russian. Although common in the colonial world, this pattern of urbanism was unique in the Russian empire. Similarly, in common with other settler societies, there were marked differences in wages between settler and native populations. As an American traveler observed in 1910, "Wages of Europeans are very high. A Russian labourer or servant expects twice or three times as much as he gets at home, but the wages of natives are low, 25 and 30 cents a day being the maximum."^[84] This combination of cheap native labor and high salaries for settlers meant that even the poorest sections of the Russian population enjoyed a standard of living considerably higher than the majority of the native population.

All this served to underscore Turkestan's uniqueness in the empire. Unlike other Muslim areas of the Russian empire, Turkestan was a relatively densely populated region with practically no Russian settlement in the beginning. It differed dramatically in that respect from the Volga region and the Crimea, which were also inhabited by Muslims but where the demographic balance was quite different and Russian rule much better entrenched. It also meant that the relationship between the rulers and the ruled was different—and more distant—than elsewhere in the Russian empire. The nomenclature adopted for classifying the local population gives some indication of this difference. Most non-Russian groups inhabiting the Russian empire were designated inorodtsy (a term best translated by the French allogènes ). Although the term had a consider-

[84] William Eleroy Curtis, Turkestan: "The Heart of Asia " (London, 1911), 289.

able semantic range, it connoted inhabitants of the Russian state who were somehow alien.^[85] For legal purposes, the population of Central Asia was classified as inorodtsy , but the term was never used in Central Asia itself, where the term tuzemtsy , directly translatable as "native," with all its connotations, held currency. Unlike inorodtsy , the term tuzemtsy asserted the connection of the given population to the land; conversely, the term also affirmed the foreignness of the Russians in the region in a manner that was inconceivable in other parts of the empire.^[86] Moreover, in Turkestan, the otherness of the local population acquired a social as well as a political or ethnic connotation, for the native population fit the state's system of classifications only awkwardly. Table 3, which classifies the local population by social categories, shows the ambivalence inherent in the state's classifications of its newest subjects. While entry into various estates was open to the native population of Turkestan, natives remained simply natives unless marked by some forth of social mobility. As the figures for Tatars show, this was not the fate of all inorodtsy in the empire.^[87]

Yet the lines between European and native were not entirely rigid. The new Russian cities were never segregated. The vast majority of the European population lived in those quarters, but a substantial proportion of their population was invariably of local origin. "Russian" Tashkent grew rapidly after its establishment in 1866. It had a population of 2,073 in 1870, 4,926 in 1877, 33,276 in 1901, and well over 56,000 in 1911.^[88]

[85] The concept behind this term has attracted little attention. Its legal and popular meanings differed considerably, and even the former did not remain constant over the last century of the old regime; see the succinct overview m Henning Bauer et al., Die Nationalitaten des Russischen Reiches in der Volkszahlung von 1897 , 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1991), 1: 416-419; see also L. Shternberg, "Inorodtsy: obshchii obzor," in A.I. Kastelianskn, ed., Formy natsional'nogo dvizhenua v sovremennykh gosudarstvakb (St Petersburg, 1910), 531-534.

[86] In actual bureaucratic practice, tuzemtsy and inorodtsy could be used as mutually exclusive categories. In 1906, the special regulations governing the election of candidates from Turkestan to the State Duma divided the electorate into "native" (tuzemnoe ) and "non-native" (netuzemnoe ) groups, thus classifying the nonnative morodtsy with the Russtans; see "Polozhenie o vyborakh v Gosudarstvennuiu Dumu," Polnoe sobrante zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperli , 3rd ser., vol. 25 (St. Petersburg, 1907), no. 26662, § 1, prilozhenie . The confusion resulting from attempts to implement this distinct, on is recorded in TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 17, d. 616, 1. 134.

[87] As a recent statistical analysis of the 1897 census has shown, Kalmyks and the "small peoples" of Siberia were the only other groups m the empire among whom large parts of the population remained simply inorodtsy ; see Bauer et al., Die Nationalitaten des Russischen Retches , II: 197.

[88] N.A. Maev, "Topograficheskii ocherk Turkestanskogo kraia," Materialy dlia statistiki Turkestanskogo kraia , 1 (1872): 10-11; Azadaev, Tashkent , 134; A.I. Dmitriev-Mamonov, ed., Putevoditel' po Turkestanu i sredne-aziatskoi zheleznot doroge (St. Petersburg, 1903), 352; Istorua Tashkenta (Tashkent, 1988), 145.

It presented a marked contrast to the old city, and already in 1873 a foreign visitor felt that "one can live for years in Russian Tashkent without even suspecting the existence of the Sart part of town."^[89] As early as 1870, members of the local population owned sixty-nine shops in the new city, and they comprised more than one-fifth of its population. By 1901, Muslims (including Tatars) accounted for one-third of the civilian population of the new city,^[90] which had sixteen mosques in 1913 (compared with fifteen churches and two synagogues).^[91]

Nor could officialdom turn unequivocally to the settler population for support, for it was not immune from the suspicion directed at local notables. Russian autocracy jealously guarded its monopoly over matters of state policy from the interference of any public groups, Russian or not. In colonial borderlands such as Turkestan, this monopoly often

[89] Ujfalvy, Expédition sctentifique , II: 14.

[90] Dmitriev-Mamonov, Putevoditel ', 352.

[91] Aztatskam Rossua , I: 320.

came up against the need to find broader support for Russian rule. Dukhovskoi's suggestion for the genetic Russification of the region was only the most blunt (because desperate) expression of the hope, frequently expressed in bureaucratic correspondence, that the answer to the lack of personnel resources in Turkestan was to entrust the supervision of various aspects of local life to members of the Russian population. Yet, seeking such support from society implied a partnership with society that the autocracy found unacceptable even after the revolution of 1905. In Turkestan, administrators hoped that Russian society would recognize its duty to empire and act in the interests of state, and they expressed astonished dismay when it failed to do so. The political agent in Bukhara wrote in 1906 of the deleterious effects of the revolution on "Russian prestige" in Bukhara, and in 1910, Governor-General Mishchenko turned literary critic in order to remind the editor of the Tashkent journal Sredniaia Aziia of his duties to Russian power in the region. Presented with a complimentary copy of the new publication, he found "extremely weak in literary terms" a sketch that presented in a poor light the behavior of army officers. "This story belongs to phenomena," he wrote, "that are altogether undesirable, especially in Central Asia."^[92] Russian society did not always agree with officialdom. It was the only segment of Turkestan's population to be involved in the revolution of 1905; in the ensuing elections to the State Duma, local Russians largely voted for radical parties of the left.^[93] The files of the political police indicate that the state found itself governing settler society almost as sternly as native society.

Along with the Russians came members of other groups that further complicated the dichotomy between Russian and native. Some, such as Ukrainians, Belorussians, and even Poles and Germans, tended to be lumped together with the Russians both in terms of perception and legal privileges. Others, such as Jews, Armenians, and Tatars, occupied separately delineated spaces in the new colonial society. A sizable Jewish community had existed in Bukhara since at least pre-Mongol times and played a significant role in the area's economic life. In 1833, Bukharan Jews were granted the same rights to trade in Russia as Muslim merchants from Bukhara and Khiva, and this pattern of equal legal treatment for all subjects of the amirs of Bukhara was maintained after the conquest.

[92] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 28, d. 1119, l. 112.

[93] On the considerable revolutionary activity among the Russian population of Turkestan, see A.V. Piaskovskli, Revoliutsua 1905-1907 godov v Turkestane (Moscow, 1958).

Kaufman saw Bukharan Jews are a good influence in Turkestan as well as a channel for Russian influence in Bukhara. Under the terms of the 1873 treaty with Bukhara, Bukharan Jews had the right to own property and to settle anywhere in Turkestan, a right denied Russian Jews. As a result, large communities of Bukharan Jews appeared in Tashkent, Samarqand, and the cities of the Ferghana valley, where they were very successful in business. This success, as well as general anti-Jewish sentiment of the reign of Alexander III (r. 1881-1894), led to a gradual curtailment of their favored status, culminating in a 1910 law that made it illegal for Bukharan Jews to reside in all but a few towns of Turkestan unless they could prove that their ancestors had lived in the area before the Russian conquest. The needed documents were duly produced, and many Jews remained in Turkestan.^[94] Some of them had acquired sizable fortunes, especially three families in Ferghana that had concentrated a great part of the raw cotton export to Russia in their hands. According to one estimate, the Vodiaevs alone managed 60 percent of this trade.^[95] In 1914, there was a large enough Jewish community in Kokand to support a newspaper, Rahamin . The wealth of the community, as well as its contacts abroad (extremely sketchy notices in contemporary travelers' accounts refer to the fact that many local Jews had contacts in Western Europe and that many spoke French fluently), allowed it to negotiate increasing legal disabilities.

An Armenian community similarly developed in the major urban centers of Turkestan, performing similar entrepreneurial functions in the economy, its arrival facilitated by the Transcaspian Railway. But for our purposes, the most important community was the Volga Tatars. Under Russian rule since the middle of the sixteenth century, the Tatars enjoyed affinities of language as well as of religion with Central Asia and had played a central role in Russia's trade with Central Asia during this period. Bukharan madrasas were also a common destination for Tatar ulama. A number of Tatars moved to Turkestan after the Russian conquest, partly because their familiarity with both Central Asia and Russia gave them a considerable competitive advantage in the area. True to form, the administration attempted to stem this unauthorized movement of people, although the repeated prohibitions are evidence of a distinct lack

[94] On Bukharan Jews, see Michael Zand, "Bukhara vii: Bukharan Jews." Encyclo-pœdta Iramca , IV: 530-545, with an exhaustive bibliography.

[95] Catherine Poujol, "Approaches to the History of Bukharan Jews' Settlement m the Fergana Valley, 1867-1917," Central Asian Survey 12 (1993): 553-554.

of success.^[96] Some Tatar and Bashkir officers served in the Russian army and therefore appeared in administrative roles; many more served as interpreters and guides; but the vast majority of Tatars living in Central Asia were connected with trade and private business. As inorodtsy , they suffered from a number of legal disabilities—they could not legally own immovable property—and were often the objects of suspicion, but they nevertheless occupied a space quite distinct from the local population. They were not tuzemtsy , and as Table 3 again shows, were much better integrated into Russian social classifications. Their position with regard to local society was, however, always ambivalent; their religious and linguistic affinities with it had made them the natural intermediaries in the Russian trade before the conquest, but they nevertheless remained outsiders. "A number of Noghays [the Turkestani term for Tatar] have arrived in these parts lately," a newspaper reader stated in 1876. "Some want to buy property here and marry locally because life is good here and the climate is better. But local Sarts and Qazaqs don't want to give them their daughters."^[97] The disdain was mutual, however, as the Tatars in Turkestan soon formed a close-knit community, which self-consciously delineated itself from the local population and looked to phenomena in the Tatar lands of European Russia for inspiration. Numerous markers separated them from the local population: Most chose to live in Russian quarters, far more Tatars sent their children to Russian schools, and Tatar women followed different codes of dress and comportment than Turkestani women. The Tatar community in Tashkent organized a benevolent society with its own school in 1902, which further served to demarcate it from the rest of Muslim society.^[98]

Yet for all the intermediary groups and the differences within Russian society, the Russian-native dichotomy came to provide the parameters within which difference and hierarchy were imagined in Turkestan. The settler population's oppositional proclivities did not render it sympathetic to the native population. The otherness of the native population was too widely shared in Russian discourse for that, and the emergence of a colonial economy tended to reinforce the differences. Even though the entire spectrum of Russian political life appeared in Turkestan, all sections of it were united in taking for granted the exclusion (or disre-

[96] TWG , 29 March 1874, 19 December 1874.

[97] TWG , 28 July 1876.

[98] Tashkand shahrining orus chastida istiqamat etub masjid-t jami 'imizga qawm bulub turghuivchi hamma abl-t mahalla noghay khalqiga ruski tatariski ishkolaning paptchitilstvasining predsidatilidan daklad (Tashkent, 1902).

gard) of the natives from mainstream politics. This fact was to be of fundamental importance in 1917. But the dichotomy was also shared by non-Russian groups in Turkestan, who appropriated it for their own uses. The vocabulary of progress and backwardness inherent in the dichotomy was also to figure prominently in the politics of cultural reform in Muslim society itself, which was made necessary by changes in society noted above and the need to make new choices in new circumstances unleashed by the Russian conquest.